Romanian-born photographer Dan St. Andrei adopts a philosophical approach to the art of photography. He states: “Life is eventually an eternal attempt to understand your purpose, to build up and mold, to grow and to define yourself … I would like to discover daily reasons to love myself.” His images take on so many different styles and approaches: from the fetishism of his sensual fragments; to the poetic dynamism of his photographs of dancers; to the reflexive and dream-like quality of his dystopic utopia images, which he calls, in a deliberate pun, Mytopia.

If his photo series have any common thread, it’s in depicting life, as Dan St. Andrei himself puts it, as “beautifully imperfect.” The beauty lies in the aesthetic impact, since Dan St. Andrei’s images are not only beautiful but also dreamy, even haunting. The imperfection is revealed in the human emotions and anxieties they reflect, holding a mirror to both what we reveal and what we hide within. As the artist puts it, through the art of photography, he searches “for the meanings and hidden motivations that put our world into motion.”

It’s difficult to imagine a world without fantasy, without dream. This would be a world devoid of possibilities, without a future. Dan St. Andrei captures our dreams and hopes in motion, as they develop, both literally from the camera as well as figuratively in our minds. He states: “There are moments when we ask ourselves about our purpose in life, about its meaning and our motivations. There are moments when we ask questions about life, as it is or as we imagine it to be.” The gap between reality and dream is not unbridgeable. It’s often connected, in fact, by art and our imaginations: “There are moments when we allow our imaginations to roam free; in which we allow ourselves to dream.”

Dan St. Andrei captures the dreamer in each of us, whether we’re artists or not. After all, it’s our dreams that make more bearable our imperfect reality; that help us change it for the better; that give us hope and a sense of drive and direction in life. Without these aesthetic dreams, we risk getting bogged down in the routines and responsibilities of daily life. The dreamer in us, the artist explains, “lives through these moments” when life’s “imperfection becomes beautiful.” This may be only our personal vision–a fantasy–or what, if we follow our dreams, we make happen in real life.

There is also a sense of nostalgia in Dan St. Andrei’s images, as he suggests bygone eras. He does this without melancholia however, even adding a ludic touch, as in the fashion series below, photographed by Dan St. Andrei and created with the help of the talented stylist, Alin Galatescu.

Andrei Octav Doicescu aptly stated: “The present disintegrates, first in history, then in nostalgia.” Nostalgia is an acute, often painful, awareness of an irretrievably lost past that we still long for in the present. But Dan St. Andrei shows us the past doesn’t have to evoke sadness. The past can reappear in our present as a playful celebration of previous epochs, in our imaginations, in art and of course in history.

Like a Proustian search for lost time in pictorial form–a search for lost love, for impossibly perfect social structures, for the (unattainable) fulfillment of our sensual and sexual desires–Dan St. Andrei’s photography captures the peregrinations of our search for meaning in a life deprived of certainties. You can view his portfolio on his website, http://danandrei.com/.

We tend to associate art and emotion. The Romantic notion of art as the product of an emotive, sensitive and inspired artist who creates masterpieces to move the public has not altogether disappeared from the popular imagination. Yet, in recent history—particularly since the movement of art for art’s sake in the nineteenth century and the formalist and conceptual currents of the twentieth century—emotion has almost disappeared from art itself. Even in the movement of conceptual art most closely associated with emotion and spirituality—abstract expressionism—emotion is a part of the process of artistic creation and palpable in the moving effect of art upon (some) viewers rather than readily recognizable in the artistic object itself. There is, of course, no eternally valid rule that dictates that emotion should be an inherent part of a work of art—or of any part of the artistic process, for that matter. And, in fact, art has not always existed as separate from artifact and artistic objects have not always been valued for their expressive powers.

For the ancient Egyptians, to offer one notable example, art served a largely symbolic and religious function. Tombs, busts and paintings were used as a means of preserving and glorifying the souls of kings, queens and other privileged members of society. E.H. Gombrich tells us that, appropriately enough, one Egyptian word for sculptor was “He-who-keeps-alive.” Egyptian artists depicted the human figure not as they saw it, nor to express or provoke emotion, but to capture the essence of an important person’s spirit for the afterlife by representing his or her body from its most characteristic angles. The face was shown in profile; the eye from the front; the shoulders and chest from the front; the legs from the side, with the feet seen from the inside and toes pointed upward. (The Story of Art, 60-1). For millennia Egyptian figures had a frozen and immobile, non-expressive look that strove to freeze the souls of powerful men and women in time and to safeguard their happiness in the afterlife.

Greek art was perhaps the first—and certainly the most influential art in the Western tradition–to capture the essence not only of the human spirit, but also of the human form, with all its movement and powers of expression. In Greek art, we feel, even the body seems infused with a soul. Myron’s famous sculpture of the discus thrower, Discobolos (c. 450 B.C), which is of the same era as the better known works of the sculptor Pheidias, displays the beauty, poise, force and movement of a young man’s efforts to launch the discus he holds in his hand. The sculpture is not entirely naturalistic—in the sense that athletes who would try to assume the same position would not be able to throw the discus very far. Nonetheless, it captures the elegance and athleticism of the male body in the first blush of youth. Part of this sculpture’s naturalism lies in the way it conveys movement and emotion through the positioning and poise of the body. This artistic video on classical sculpture by Philip Scott Johnson highlights this phenomenon:

More generally, classical Greek and Hellenistic sculptures rarely look stiff or contrived because of the way in which the human form is balanced: often in a position of counterpoise, with the weight shifted upon one leg, which allows sculptors to reveal the muscular curvatures of the body.

While classical Greek sculpture tends to focus upon the beauty of the human form, Hellenistic art—the art of the empires founded by Alexander the Great’s followers—places increasing emphasis upon the expression of emotion. The kinds of feelings represented in Hellenistic sculpture, however, are not those of everyday people in ordinary circumstances. Rather, Hellenistic art usually exhibits the emotions of extraordinary individuals engaged in tragic conflicts. To offer one well-known example, the sculpture Laocöon and his sons (175-50 B.C.)—executed by Hagesandros, Anthenodoros and Polydoros of Rhodes–immortalizes the story of a priest who is being punished by the gods for forewarning the Trojans not to accept a giant horse which, as it turns out, carried inside it enemy soldiers.

This sculpture was rediscovered in Rome in 1506 and many art historians believe that what was found was not the original sculpture, but a Roman copy. Whether or not it is the original work, The Laocöon Group made a strong impression upon Italian Renaissance sculptors, especially Michelangelo. Laocoon is frozen in an image of terrible anguish since his punishment consists of having to witness two gigantic snakes emerge from the sea and suffocate with their coils his beloved sons. Hellenistic art, at least in this representative sculpture that would become a favorite during the Renaissance and the Neoclassical periods, privileges the expression of a kind of emotion that is at once mythical and dramatic: mythical in its literary and religious references, dramatic in its depiction of human tragedy.

The painting and sculpture of the Renaissance masters continues to focus upon the expression of emotion on a grand scale and to grapple with the connection—as well as the hiatus–between the human and the divine. Michelangelo’s The Dying Slave (1513), for example, reveals the moment when the slave lets go of earthly life as his soul escapes toward heavenly existence.

Despite the twists and turns of his beautiful, muscular form, the slave’s body reflects the resignation, tranquility and spirituality of the transition from life to death. Emotive expression, Michelangelo shows so well, is not necessarily primarily located in the face. The whole body, every movement and gesture, expresses the feelings and attitudes reflected in the face.

This total, eloquent expressivity of sculpture reaches its apex, many believe, in Lorenzo Bernini’s The ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1645-52). The sculpture represents the sixteenth century mystic in a state of rapture. We witness the moment when the angel of God pierces the young nun with a golden arrow, provoking the paradoxical feelings of pleasure mixed with pain and of sensual abandon mixed with divine illumination. As she swoons, half-closing her eyes and slightly opening her lips with ecstasy, Saint Teresa becomes the very embodiment of religious fervor, spiritual attunement and passion. Even the drapery that enfolds her body swirls and twists around her with the same mixture of passive yet passionate frenzy visible on her face.

But what about the expression of more modest, individuated feelings? In the modern period, few artists were as thoughtful and successful in showing the relation between human form and feeling as Auguste Rodin. Despite the religious allusions of The Gates of Hell, Rodin brings emotion down to earth by materializing a passion that functions not only as a connection between the human and the divine, but also as an intimate and profound connection between earthly lovers. Perhaps no one else has described Rodin’s most sensual and moving sculpture, “The Kiss,” as eloquently as his friend, the art critic Gustave Geffroy:

“The man’s head is bent, that of the woman is lifted, and their mouths meet in a kiss that seals the intimate union of their two beings. Through the extraordinary magic of art, this kiss, which is scarcely indicated by the meeting of their lips, is clearly visible, not only in their meditative expressions, but still more in the shiver that runs equally through both bodies, from the nape of the neck to the soles of the feet, in every fiber of the man’s back, as it bends, straightens, grows still, where everything adores—bones, muscles, nerves, flesh—in his leg, which seems to twist slowly, as if moving to brush against his lover’s leg; and in the woman’s feet, which hardly touch the ground, uplifted with her whole being as she is swept away with ardor and grace.”

Rodin revealed human love and life as a process of mutual creation between women and men. Passion is not only a union with those we desire and adore, but also an elevation through shared feelings and sensuality which is always in process, never complete. His representations of the fragility of our mutual creation were as inchoate, vulnerable yet compelling as the material shapes that seemed to emerge only part-finished from the bronze or blocks of stone. In the expression of the beauty, erotic fervor and intensity of human emotion, postromanticism carries on Rodin’s artistic legacy.

We have seen that art can serve many different purposes in different contexts such that it’s impossible to define it in relation to any set of common qualities, including emotion. Yet, as I have also suggested, when emotion is materialized in art, it renders artistic objects all the more poignant, moving and palpable for viewers. The expression of emotion not only touches us, but also enables us to connect to artistic creation in a way that’s unique and irreplaceable. This is why postromantic art continues the Romantic legacy of expressing the fragility, contingency and intensity of human emotion at each stage of the creative process: the feelings and inspiration of the artist; the expressivity of artistic representations, and the emotional impact upon viewers. Emotion and art don’t have to be interconnected. Yet what beautiful and meaningful art is produced when they are!

As an inherently subjective field despite (or perhaps because of) its many changing standards, art has been surrounded by controversy (at least) ever since the Impressionists changed the aesthetic standards of the Academy in the nineteenth century. What was at stake then in the heated debates surrounding the official Salon is similar to what is at stake now in the controversy surrounding the Biennale de Paris: an understanding of art, its forums, its distribution and its cultural value. The Biennale de Paris was launched by Raymond Cogniat in 1959 and set up by the writer André Malraux, who was at the time the Minister of Culture. Its role was to showcase creative talent worldwide and to provide a place where artists, critics, gallery owners, and others involved in the fields of art could share their work and exchange ideas. But ever since Alexandre Gurita took over the BDP in 2000, this forum has been plagued by debates that get to the core of the meaning and place of art today: should it be a place or places? Who counts as an artist? What is art? What counts as an artwork? Who should give it value or cultural meaning?

Will the real Biennale de Paris please stand up?

According to Gurita, the controversy surrounding the Biennale de Paris “would make a best-seller”. The BDP originally directed by Malraux was abandoned by the Ministry of Culture in 1985. Between 1985-2000, there were debates and investigations concerning the ways in which to modernize it and how to relaunch it. In 2000, Alexandre Gurita took over this project and changed it radically, from within. Through the notion of « invisual art »(1), he broke the sacred law that says « art = art objet » which creates an automatic dependency between art and work of art. He asserts that art can express itself otherwise than through art objects and declares : « There is no proof that art is depending from the art object. For that reason we can assume the contrary ». In a move that the sociologist of art Pierre Bourdieu would have been proud of, he also challenged the hierarchies imposed by all the mediators – art critics, gallery owners, museum curators – between artists and their public. In so doing, he also disposed with the idea that some artistic spaces – like museums of contemporary art or posh galleries – are privileged spaces to exhibit artwork. Some of the French officials and art critics were up in arms, even though many of them had applauded Bourdieu, one of the most highly consecrated philosophers and sociologists of art, for proposing exactly the same ideas. Gurita just put them into practice.

In his ground-breaking book, Distinction, Pierre Bourdieu argued that society uses “symbolic goods, especially those regarded as the attributes of excellence, […as] the ideal weapon in strategies of distinction” that shape various hierarchies, especially class hierarchies. The art world is still filled with such social distinctions, which aren’t only class-based, by the way. As I’ve argued before, most contemporary artists–no matter what class or place they come from–don’t have meaningful access to the public. Aside from a handful of (mostly postmodern) artists, most artists find it impossible to showcase their art in museums of contemporary art or in the most prestigious galleries. In turn, this means that collectors don’t get to see and buy their artwork and that critics don’t view it and discuss it. To change this hierarchical system of distinction, Alexandre Gurita dispensed with the mediators (gallery and museum curators) between the artists and the public. The participants set themselves the dates and the places for their own activities. On its official website, http://biennaledeparis.org the reinvented Biennale de Paris includes the following tenets, a true Manifesto of a new aesthetic pluralism:

« The Biennale de Paris was launched in 1959 by André Malraux with the purpose of creating a meeting place for those who would define the art of the future. After a hiatus of several years, the Biennale was relaunched in 2000. Since then it has not ceased in its efforts to unravel art from institutions. The Biennale de Paris rejects the use of art objects, which are too alienated by the market. It does not confine itself to a framework that would hinder its present actions or its political, economic and ideological evolution. By acting upon everyday life and its unfolding realities, the Biennale seeks to redefine art by using criteria which rejects the idea of the artist as the sole protagonist in his work. Simply stated, the Biennale de Paris refuses to participate in today’s conventional art world. By mixing genres, exploiting porous frontiers and practicing the redistribution of roles, the Biennale de Paris allows art to appear precisely where it’s not expected. Furthermore, the Biennale de Paris has its own guidelines(2).

In a personal interview, Gurita told me that he perceives undermining the system of distinction as “an instrument of liberty placed at the service of art. In 2000 my act created an enormous scandal and enraged certain representatives of the system. Others, however, liked the idea that an artist combats an institution.” Not everyone in France greeted this radical overhaul quite as enthusiastically. Government officials initially disowned the Biennale de Paris, claiming that the real Biennale was moved to Lyon. Even art critics–who generally can’t praise enough the cutting-edge and avant-garde art–weren’t too flattering. Did the Biennale escape them? In the Editorial of Beaux-Arts Magazine, for instance, Fabrice Bousteau referred to the project as “the regrettable Biennale de Paris, mixing expos, concerts, performances, conferences, and accomplish with the creators of the whole world in several areas of the city” (May 2007). The critic for France’s elite leftwing newspaper, Libération, adopted the official government position that the Biennale de Paris has been transferred to Lyon: “Since 1991, France itself has its Biennale in Lyon. The latter picks up the slack from the defunct Biennale de Paris, which had its last meeting in 1985.” (Libération, April 2006)

The objective of the new Biennale de Paris is nothing less than changing the idea of art as a unified domain of cultural production and rigid, hierchical distinctions. More than that, it proposes an art “without pieces of art, an art without exhibition, an art without spectatorship, an art without curatorship, authors without authority.” As for when it happens, don’t set your calendars, since that’s also relative. “The Biennale de Paris takes place when it happens. It exists in real time. Each biennial begins when the previous ends. Associated practices evolve over the course of successive editions.” Where does it take place? “The Biennale de Paris takes place where it happens. Relocating itself, it looks for a reciprocity with the practices locality, in order to ponder over and modify social, economical, political and ideological backgrounds.

Before you conclude that you’re finding yourself in one of Eugen Ionesco’s absurdist plays, I’d like to remind you that the art world has often been subject to radical redefinition from within. To stick to the theme of French culture, I’ll use the Impressionist movement as an example. The Biennale de Paris is not the only one to be rejected by the establishment. It finds itself in good company, since the Impressionists – are arguably still the most popular artists in the world–were rejected as well.

If any art collection can be said to have a profound impact upon the history of art and aesthetics, the paintings exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863 would certainly be on a top ten list. This collection of paintings marks both a change of views about what counts as good art and a liberating shift in the institutions that consecrated French art to begin with. Before this crucial moment, the production of good art was heavily regulated. From the seventeenth-century, when Colbert instituted the first Salon that would display the art of the painters of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, the Salons and the Academy largely determined artistic standards. Even when the Salon was opened to all artists in 1791, the rules by which they were judged did not become less rigid, even though the number of artists who could display grew substantially as did the public patronage of the arts.

When in 1863 the official Salon rejected 3000 pieces out of the 5000 submitted by artists, with hindsight we can safely say that it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In a half-mocking, half-appeasing gesture towards the rejected artists, Napoleon III authorized a Salon de Refusés in a space that was distinct from the prestigious Salon sponsored by the Académie.

Like Napoleon I, the Emperor utilized art to express the glory of the French empire. The standards of the official salon were set by the traditional Count Nieuwerkerke, who was the Intendant of the Beaux Arts. He lived in a seventeen room suite in the Louvre and regulated all artistic life at court. By the 1860′s, however, artists and intellectuals–especially in more liberal newspapers– began to object to the rigid standards of the Academy and the Salon. Many of them demanded inclusion in the Salon for a wider range of talented artists.

Napoleon III paid a visit to the Salon and told Nieuwerkerke–perhaps in part to clip his wings–that many of the works rejected were just as good as those accepted. He then ordered that all the works rejected by the Salon be shown in the Palais de L’Industrie in its own show that would be called, condescendingly, the Salon de Refusés. This created the opportunity for new artists such as Manet, Pissaro and Whistler –the generation that had a profound influence upon modern art and especially upon the Impressionist movement–to become more visible in the public eye.

Manet also proved to be a key factor in the dissolution of the Salon de Refusés, however. Once the Emperor saw his Déjeuner sur l’herbe, he was shocked by its undisguised sexuality and agreed with the Academy that the first Salon de Refusés should also be the last. Nonetheless, the controversy stirred a heated debate over the nature of modern art and eventually opened the way for the Salon des Indépendants, galleries, and other institutions that soon rivaled and eventually exceeded the official Salon’s influence upon art. In fact, in a reversal of aesthetic values, less than twenty years after the Salon de Refusés, the artists associated with this controversial exhibit, particularly Manet, would be enshrined as the founders of modern art. Conversely, the official Salon art would fall into disrepute as mechanical, uninventive, formalistic: in short, l’art pompier, a pejorative term used to describe David’s Roman headgear, which resembled the helmets of firefighters (pompiers). As it often happens, the most effective subversive, anti-establishment artists and artistic movements often become–by their sheer cultural impact and visibility–the new establishment in art.

I believe that a similar process is at work in the manner in which Alexandre Gurita is redefining our understanding of the art world today. His pluralistic understanding of art opens up the field of cultural production to diverse artists, locations, modes of giving cultural value, and audiences. Although his project may have been accused by some of nihilism, I’d say that there’s a big philosophical – actual – difference between pluralism and nihilism. Nihilism represents a flat denial of all values, be they ethical or aesthetic. By way of contrast, pluralism supports the value of a multitude of standards. Although pluralism can be relativistic, it doesn’t have to be. The standards for many aesthetic values can be defended and validated. Personally, as the founder of a more or less traditional movement in art (postromanticism.com) I’ll take artistic pluralism over rigid hierarchy any day.

As I have argued in my previous article, The Conformism of Postmodern Style, I object to the fact that elitist practices in museums of contemporary art and in some galleries impose a certain conformity (which I loosely associate with postmodern art) upon the art world. In so doing, they don’t give diverse artists a real, fair and democratic shake at presenting their works to the public. But, to my mind, envy of those artists who have “made it” or tearing down the entire artistic establishment is not the solution. Opening up the art world from within is. The French have a saying about this: Vive la différence! The art that Alexandre Gurita endorses – invisual art – is as far removed from my more traditional postromantic art movement as you can get. However, to my mind, the real issue is not imposing one standard of what constitutes good or true art, but making it possible for different kinds of artists and artistic styles to be shared with the public in a multitude of venues. This is what the reincarnated Biennale de Paris directed by Gurita aims to do.

In such a newly redefined art world – or art fields, more like it–it’s possible for more traditional artists like the postromantics to coexist and share cultural space and ideas with the more avant-garde postmodernists. And if anybody in France still accuses Gurita of political correctness, they can blame it on Pierre Bourdieu, who, incidentally – and ironically – won the prestigious Médaille d’or du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). This goes to show that it pays to shake things up and repudiate cultural consecration. You might even get awarded a medal for it!

Claudia Moscovici, postromanticism.com

(1) The invisual is visible but not as art. Invisual do not need to be seen to exist.

(2) -Orientations : The Biennale de Paris rejects exhibitions and art objects. It refuses to be ”thought by art”. It identifies and defends true alternatives. It calls for “non-standard practices”.

-Strategy : To be liquid. If the ground floor is occupied, occupy the floor below.

-An Invisual Art : No serious proof exists that art is dependent on the art object. We can therefore assume the opposite. The Biennale de Paris promotes invisual practices which do not need to be seen to exist. The invisual is visible but not as art.

-A Non-Artistic Art : The Biennale de Paris defends an art which does not obey the common criteria for art: creative, emotive, aesthetic, spectacular…

-An Art which Operates in Everyday Reality : The Biennale de Paris promotes practices that relegate art to the background in order to conquer everyday reality.

-A Public of Indifference : With the Biennale de Paris there are no more art spectacles. The Biennale addresses what it calls “a public of indifference”: persons who, consciously or accidentally, interact with propositions that can no longer be identified as artistic.

-A Unified Criticism : Organised as a network, the Biennale de Paris constitutes a critical mass composed of hundreds of initiatives, which would otherwise have been isolated and without impact.

On February 1, 2011 Google launched the groundbreaking Google Art Project. This is an online, high-resolution compilation of some of the greatest works of art, featured in some of the most famous museums, worldwide: including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and, my personal favorite, the Frick Collection in New York City; the Uffizi in Florence; the Palace of Versailles in Paris and the Tate Gallery in London. All in all, seventeen museums and galleries participated in this revolutionary venture.

According to the Wikipedia, Elizabeth Merritt, the Director of the Center for the Future of Museums, described the project as an “interesting experiment.” Other leaders in the world of art greeted this venture with more optimism. Julian Raby, the Director of the Freer Gallery of Art, stated that this project would increase viewers’ interest in visiting the actual museums. Brian Kennedy shared this view, stating that even though the virtual museum and gallery tours offer better resolution and panoramic perspectives, that’s still not a substitute for seeing the works of art in person.

It’s not the same, but, in my opinion, the Google Art Project represents the wave of the future–if not the present–not just for museums, but also for art galleries. Galleries in particular have taken a terrible hit during the past few years. Many were forced to go out of business. During tough economic times, art is seen as a luxury that many consumers are willing to forgo. The Google Art Project generates interest in great works of art once again. And with interest comes visits to the museum and galleries, which in turn, increases the number of art collectors and buyers.

Incidentally, I also love the idea that Google, which now owns YouTube, combines the virtual museum tours with YouTube videos related to selected artists or works of art. By combining beautiful art and music, sometimes even local scenes, and by being so widely accessible to hundreds of millions of YouTube viewers, Google is making art accessible and inviting not only to art lovers but also to those who have only a remote interest in art.

The world of art has reached a pivotal turning point due to this, and similar, technological advances. Those galleries that will adapt to these new ways of reaching viewers to inform and attract the general public will be much more likely to survive than those that will not. I can’t see virtual reality becoming a substitute for actual reality in any domain: be it art, sex or entertainment. But I do see virtual reality as the most effective–and now, indispensable–way to spread information about the reality that will count most in the twenty-first century. You can learn more about this project by visiting the website http://www.googleartproject.com/c/faq.

More recently, in May 2011, Google also launched Google Music, an online service that offers music in a similar fashion to itunes (in fact, you can import songs from itunes on it). This new service is very versatile: you can purchase songs on Google plus as well as store up to 20,000 songs for free. So far Google Music is available only to U.S. residents, but it will soon open up to other parts of the world. You can find more information about Google Music on the website http://music.google.com.

The twentieth century was the era of specialization. Every field became so highly specialized and technical that only experts could master each discipline. The twenty-first century, however, is the era of collaboration. As an art critic, I’ve witnessed this comingling among different fields in the domains of advertising, cinema and photography. Some of the most talented photographers in the world work as Directors of Photography for commercials and film. Since both are primarily visual arts, one might expect a fruitful collaboration between the domains of photography and film. What is more unexpected, however, is the combination of photography and dance. No artist that I know of has pulled it off better than Richard Calmes.

An American dance photographer with a growing international reputation, Richard Calmes has travelled all over the United States to capture the talent of some of the most gifted dancers and share it with the world. His images range from the most urban contemporary dancers in New York to the most classical dancers in Washington D.C. He experiments with light, setting and color to capture the unique aspects of each genre of dance as well as of each dancer. His photography represents an homage to the beauty of dance as well as to the mental and physical strength and discipline it takes to be a dancer and make your body do what most of us can’t: and, what’s more, do it gracefully.

In an email exchange, Richard told me that his great admiration for dancers has a personal dimension (as well as, incidentally, a connection to my native country, Romania): “My daughter danced in Bucharest in the early 90’s. There was a dance Company here in Atlanta, Georgia founded by a Romanian, Pavel Rotaru, who was once a famous dancer there. He took them to Romania on tour and they were received with much passion. She had a great time. It was watching her grow up and improve year after year which taught me the sacrifices and love dancers have for their art!”

Richard Calmes’ images, like dance itself, are poetry in motion. They express movement, personality, character, mood and theme. His more shadowy black and white series is understated, classic and mysterious. Most of his images, however, include striking and bright colors, to capture the drama, sensuality and passion of modern dance. And then you also have his motion or dynamic series, which trace the movements of the dancers in flight, to maintain the focus on dance as the most dynamic art form.

Featured on the covers of dance magazines as well as in gallery exhibitions, the photography of Richard Calmes shows the benefits of specialization and collaboration among the arts. This is no Marxist rotation of disciplines, where everyone purports to be good at everything: an impossible utopian goal that leads to nobody being really good at anything. Rather, Calmes’ images show the best of contemporary artistic reality at work: the most talented artists in each field working together to create something far better together than they would separately, as you can see in this video:

In my estimation, we’ll continue to see each field of art develop (both technically and artistically) and thrive in its own genre while at the same time we’ll see more and more collaborations among artists working in different domains. Soon art exhibits will no longer be held only in museums or galleries, but also in dance halls, movie theaters and concert halls. Analogously, dancers will sometimes dance at gallery exhibits, particularly when the exhibit itself focuses on the art of dance. Calmes is paving the way not only for other photographers, but also for the increasingly multidisciplinary direction of contemporary art in general. For more information about Richard Calmes’ photography, take a look at the artist’s website on the link below.

Alex M. Bustillo is an international artist par excellence. Born in Miami, Florida and of Cuban origin, he currently resides in France. Alex has lived throughout the world, however, including the United States, Puerto Rico, Latin America and Italy. It’s not only his diverse cultural backgrounds that shine through in his photographic collages, but also his keen interest in all aspects of culture: including philosophy, literature, music and film.

Pablo Picasso is credited with having invented the artistic collage, made up of sketches, painting and newspaper cutouts. Bustillo transforms this modernist tradition into a postmodern artform that includes overlapping materials as diverse as digital photography, plexiglas and aluminum foil that somehow work together to create a striking and unique artistic whole. Not limited to the visual arts, Bustillo has even collaborated with the American musician Garland Jeffreys to incorporate musical ideas in a visual context.

Bustillo doesn’t shy away from anthropology, philosophy or even erotic fiction. His collection Story of the Eye (above) offers a visual interpretation of Georges Bataille‘s famous erotic and philosophical collection of vignettes by the same name, which was published in 1928. Bataille is best known for his anthropology of pleasure, Eroticism (1957), which studies human sexuality in terms of religious sacrifice and cultural taboos.

But it’s Bataille’s erotic tale that captured the imagination of artists, literary critics and film producers. Written in the tradition of libertine fiction made popular in eighteenth-century France by the Marquis de Sade, Story of the Eye describes the erotic passion between an adolescent male (the narrator) and Simone, his main partner. The couple have a menage-à-trois with Marcelle, a mentally ill teenage girl, engaging together in various exhibitionist acts (in front of Simone’s mother) and other taboo sexual behaviors.

Simone and the narrator are the original Bonnie and Clyde–or Natural Born Killers, more like it–manifesting their penchant for transgression through their increasingly violent sexual bond. When Marcelle breaks out of the mental institution, she becomes suicidal and hangs herself. The sociopathic lovers have sex next to her corpse, suggesting necrophilia, a recurrent theme in the book. This seedy story seems to be taken right out of pulp or pornographic fiction; however, it’s become a favorite allegory of taboo and transgression among French (and Francophile) intellectuals. Both the American feminist critic Susan Sontag and the French structuralist literary critic Roland Barthes wrote about it.

In Bustillo’s interpretation, Bataille’s tale of sexual liberty and libertinism takes a dystopic turn. His dramatic images are atavistic yet historical (in the photograph above you can see superposed images of an Egyptian bust, an American Indian chief and a Roman soldier); disembodied yet carnal (one slim leg appears, suggesting death rather than desire). Rather than glorifying transgression, they tell the story of what (and who) is sacrificed by the individual and society when the sadistic and perverse are allowed free reign and gain power over others. At once elusive and allusive, the photography of Alex M. Bustillo provides a tantalizing peek into the world of culture. You can view more of Alex’s portfolio on the link http://www.saatchionline.com/alexmbustillo.

Damien Hirst is probably the most controversial and successful artist of our times, particularly if one measures success by how much critical attention art gets and how much it sells for. The founder of the avant-garde Young British Artists and considered to be the richest living artist in Great Britain, Hirst has had more than his share of both positive and negative media attention. The critical and artistic elite, however, hails him as one of the most innovative neoconceptual artists of our times. This is a very high honor, indeed, given that conceptual art has dominated the latter part of the twentieth century and continues to be very popular with critics today.

In most of his work, the philosopher and art critic for The Nation, Arthur Danto, explains the rise of conceptual art. His artistic heroes are Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, who arguably contributed most visibly to make art what it is today: aesthetic in the critical and reflexive ideas it raises about art rather than in the way it represents objects. Duchamp’s urinal and Warhol’s brillo boxes, Danto argues, are not artistic in their materiality. There’s nothing intrinsic to these objects that makes them different from ordinary household objects. Their aesthetic qualities, Danto suggests, lie in the way their make us question the nature and existence of art in a new and provocative way. The millennia-old Platonic tradition of understanding art as some kind of inferior mimesis or imitation of reality is clearly gone in such readymade objects and pop art assemblages. Gone is also the equally old tradition, famously initiated by Plato and resurrected by the Romantics, of art as a special, almost daemonic, force that inspires artists to create works of beauty. Last but not least, in reading Danto we get the impression that the notion of creativity and originality, defended by the French writer Emile Zola in his ardent defense of Manet, has been pushed to the extreme by Duchamp, Warhol and , more recently, by Hirst himself.

Much of Damien Hirst’s art explicitly evokes the concept (and reality) of death. His most famous readymade, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, features a 14-foot tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in an aquarium. This piece was created in 1991, bought by the artist’s original patron, Charles Saatchi, and redone in 2006 (since the original began to rot). Hirst’s other controversial readymades include dead and dissected animals, a cow and a sheep (Away from the Flock), also preserved in formaldehyde. My personal favorite is In and Out of Love, which consists of colorful and delicate butterflies whose beauty in death is preserved by art.

Those familiar with the world of art already know everything I’ve just summarized. Now I’d like to examine Hirst’s art in terms of its cultural role as well as in terms of its complementarity to my own contemporary art movement, postromanticism.com. I will first consider Hirst’s powerful impact in the field of contemporary art, then his striking conceptualization of death, which will lead me to explore the continuity between the themes of Eros and Thanatos: desire and the life force represented by my movement postromanticism.com and death and mortality being represented by Hirst’s conceptual art.

1. The Field of Cultural Production and Shock Value. Although sympathetic to those who value the role of conceptual art to provoke thought, ideas and change assumptions about what is art, I tend to look at art more pragmatically and sociologically, relying upon the works of the French sociologist of art, Pierre Bourdieu (The Field of Cultural Production and Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste). I believe that art is what “the field of cultural production”—namely, art critics, artists, patrons, art schools, art teachers and professors and museum curators—say it is. The art considered most valuable by these cultural forums—meaning not only the art that sells for most money, but also the art that gets most critical attention (even if not always of the positive variety!)—is what defines art for a given context. This may seem somewhat relativistic, but it doesn’t have to be: if one assumes that critics, artists, etc. propose valid and defensible standards of aesthetic value and judge art accordingly. Hirst’s works have probably made the biggest impact in the recent history of art, where conceptual art dominates the art scene, particularly in critical reviews and museums of contemporary art. (Of course, in other essays, I argue that conceptual art shouldn’t dominate those venues, and that curators and art critics should become more open to different styles of art, including more traditional styles inspired by the Romantic and realist traditions, which are very popular with galleries and the general public).

Hirst’s works are not original in the traditional Kantian sense of inimitability. In fact, the artist imitated his own work of art by placing a second shark in formaldehyde when the first one started to decompose. His work is original, however, in the sense of making a huge cultural splash and in being the first—or one of the first–of its kind to make that kind of impact or statement. This sense of originality is not far removed from shock value, a term which many (including me) have used to criticize postmodern art. The more I’ve opened my mind to all types of art since starting my art blog, however, the less critical and the more positive I’ve become about shock value. In fact, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that shock value may be necessary to keeping art alive in culture.

Art runs the risk of becoming increasingly culturally irrelevant. If you look at what attracts most public attention nowadays it’s the latest shenanigans of the Kardashians; the latest fashions and shoe trends; the cutest purses; the latest Hollywood hookups and scandals, the juiciest political sex scandals and–let’s not forget–the Royal Wedding. Not just art, but also politics risk falling by the wayside. As you may recall, in the not-so-distant past, it used to be that every major newspaper had foreign correspondents. Now we see the proliferation of entertainment editors and blogs, which have replaced, for the most part, foreign correspondents. In the U.S., rather sadly, international news has become almost exclusively a matter of headlines pertaining strictly to our foreign policy. We have to dig hard, as Americans, to find out what’s going on in the rest of the world outside of the area of high-profile celebrities, the wars we start, political scandals, or natural disasters. If international politics has become less relevant—in selling newspapers–than Kim Kardashian’s new engagement ring, you can imagine that the world of art risks being left even further behind.

The number of entertainment editors and blogs keep growing, while the number of high-profile art critics keeps falling, as the art and book critics are being swallowed up into the general rubric of Arts or Entertainment, which for the most part focuses on best-selling books and film reviews. In this context, if artists do not create something very entertaining, shocking and provocative to get the arts and entertainment critics and, more importantly, the general public interested in them, the world of art is likely to fade in the background of culture like a shy wallflower. Artists like Damien Hirst offer aesthetic objects that are so provocative that whether or not you like that kind of art or even find it “artistic,” it places art, once again, at the center of public discussion, which is where it should be. As George Bernard Shaw famously stated, “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”

2. From Eros to Thanatos: Postromanticism and Damien Hirst’s art. Judging by its own aesthetic standards, I also appreciate the way Damien Hirst’s neoconceptual art makes us think about the continuity between love and death, or between Eros and Thanatos. In many respects, his artworks are opposite of and complementary to the art movement I co-founded with Leonardo Pereznieto in 2002, postromanticism.com. Postromanticism emphasizes the importance of beauty, sensuality and passion in contemporary representational art. While being original and edgy, postromantic art maintains the verisimilitude of the artistic objects—be they paintings, photographs or sculptures—which resemble the objects they depict.

By way of contrast, the notion of verisimilitude isn’t really applicable as a standard by which to judge Damien Hirst’s art. Hirst often exhibits the real object: the real sheep, the real shark, the real butterflies, in the same way that Warhol exhibited the real brillo boxes and Duchamp an actual latrine. Postromantic art is all about the importance of desire, love and passion in human life. Hirst’s artworks show us the ephemeral nature of such emotions. They often represent the literal embodiment of mortality, underscoring the fleeting nature of biological life itself. Postromanticism and Hirst’s conceptual art may therefore seem polar opposites, and in some respects they are. But every major anthropological and psychological study of love and death has depicted these oppositions as inextricably connected. Freud is known for discussing the link between love and death in his book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, or between the life force (Eros, desire, sexuality) and the death force (or Thanatos, a term made popular by Paul Federn). Looking at the life and death forces in terms of energy flow, psychoanalysis looks at desire as a dissipation of energy, where every orgasm represents a “small death.”

Anthropologists make the link between love and death even more explicitly by looking at desire in the context of human sacrifice. The best book I’ve read on this subject is Georges Bataille’s L’Erotisme. For Bataille, love represents the hopeless search for our lost continuity. It’s hopeless because the unions we attain through sex and love are very fleeting. After copulation we return once again to our individuated, solitary selves. As they say, we’re all alone in pain and death. “In essence,” Bataille states, “the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation… The most violent thing of all for us is death which jerks us out of a tenacious obsession with the lastingness of our discontinuous being.”

Postromantic passion, as expressed by the artists associated with postromanticism.com, is a celebration of desire, respect, love and obsession for as long as these deep and powerful emotions can last. This art also celebrates passing on and transforming artistic traditions—the Romantic movement, neoclassicism and art nouveau—for our contemporary times. Hirst’s art provokes us to think about the obverse sides of love and desire: how quickly they can dissipate; how contingent human emotions can be; how wrong we often are about the objects of our desire; how idealization often turns into the devaluation of the object of love (or just lust); how even when love lasts, unfortunately, our lives do not. The danger represented by his tiger sharks or the mortality displayed by his dissected animals is, after all, also our own mortality and the danger we can pose to each other.

To emphasize the importance of this complementarity between postromanticism and Hirst’s neoconceptual art, I’d like to allude to one last cultural figure: Mikhail Bakhtin, the famous Russian formalist critic. Bakhtin argued that art and literary are chronotopic rather than just diachronic. By this he meant that artistic and literary movements don’t happen just in linear/temporal sequence, one following the other, as they’re often taught in art and literary history. New art movements often go back in time to find inspiration in much older movements, the way Neo-Classicism found inspiration in Greek and Roman art and Romanticism went back to Medieval art.

The relation between postromanticism and Hirst’s neoconceptual is similar: each finds inspiration in older movements. Moreover, they end up depicting the themes of love and death in a way analogous to how the Romantic and Symbolist movements did this centuries earlier. Postromanticism draws more from the Romantic tradition while Hirst’s art echoes Symbolist obsessions (with death, decay, the unconscious, fears, and pushing the boundaries of art). I believe that the tension and complementarity between these two contemporary art movements is exciting and necessary. After all, a worthwhile human life must entail both the appreciation and celebration of love and beauty and the resignation and sense of irony towards our cosmic insignificance and transience. It all depends, like in the illusionist picture of the young or old woman featured below, upon your perspective.

Majeed Benteeha is an Iranian-born photographer, poet and aspiring film producer. Moving back and forth between Tehran and New York City, he simultaneously combines and clashes both worlds, in a spectacular mix that challenges cultural assumptions on both fronts. His images often feature veiled women posing nude in an iconic fashion that seems more sacred than profane.

Benteenha’s strikingly original photography violates religious orthodoxies–about feminine modesty, about the religious and social connotations of the veil–only to show us another way to respect women and all that they represent: love, maternity, sensuality, desire, intelligence.

His images are simple, beautiful, erotic and dramatic. They include symbols associated with the Muslim faith, but also seem very European in many respects. Perhaps unwittingly, Beenteha’s photography alludes to works like L’Erotisme, by the French anthropologist and philosopher Georges Bataille, which presents the sacred as inextricably related to the profane: not just for Muslim societies, but for all cultures in general. Bataille famously states:

“The essence of morality is a questioning about morality and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.”

It seems that is precisely what Beenteha’s artistic short film below underscores, in its mirroring and contrast between a universal modernity and Muslim tradition; between light and dark; between masculine and feminine; between tenderness and predation; between desire and contempt.

The Romanian photographer Nicolae Cosniceru puts a new spin on commercial and fashion photography. His images are stylish and polished, yet also have a rough, urban, element that takes viewers by surprise and makes them look closer at his pictures. They are often a study in contrast, in juxtaposition. Take, for instance, his high fashion photo shoot that takes place in a prison. The gorgeous models, dressed for a red carpet event, elegantly step out of the prison cells as if they were leaving a fancy restaurant. Next to them we see several prisoners, dressed in dingy prison uniforms, sitting calmly on a bench and getting their buzz haircuts. From their facial expressions you’d think: life as usual, for both the glamorous women and the imprisoned men. But the incongruity of the setting for the high fashion shoot adds an element of surprise that makes you do a double-take. Whatever may seem familiar about the world of entertainment and high fashion–which has almost taken the place of politics on the news–becomes, once again, refreshingly new.

Many of Cosniceru’s images also have more than a hint of humor. In Self-Portrait, featured above, the subject poses with the insolent manner of a European artist and intellectual: cigarette in hand (à la Jean-Paul Sartre?); in a spiffy black jacket; white striped shirt not buttoned all the way (only businessmen do that); gaze oriented upwards, most likely lost in profound thoughts. But the setting, once again, is rather unexpected and incongruous. The intellectual conducts his artistic contemplation not quite on the throne, but close enough: in a public restroom. For an added humorous touch, the toilet paper on the table is offered at a discount. And just to make sure viewers know they’re dealing with an Eastern European context, the bathroom door is smeared with the word DEFECT.

In a recent interview, Nicolae Cosniceru told me that he plans an artistic image to the same degree of detail that a painter would plan his painting. Self-Portrait includes relevant details, such as a cockroach on the floor, symbolic of the misery of the communist era. The photographer also revealed that he thought about placing a female model inside the stall, so viewers could see a woman’s feet and shoes instead of a man’s, to heighten the effect of the juxtapositions of the image. Devoted to the art of photography and a passionate aesthete–as well as, simultaneously, a loving and devoted husband and father–Cosniceru gives it his all, both in his art and in his family life.

Bakhtin, the famous Russian literary critic, argued that good literature (and art) is great at rendering the familiar new again. He coined a word for this process: defamiliarization. Through its surprising and innovative contrasts, Cosniceru’s photography defamilizes every concept and context it portrays, obliging viewers to look at his subjects with new eyes: not just once, but twice. Because when you look at Cosniceru’s provocative images it’s nearly impossible to resist doing a double-take. You can see more of his photography on his websites http://cosniceru.com/ and http://www.fotofactory.ro/

Philippe Pache was born in 1961 in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was educated at the School of Applied Arts of Vevey. Since 1982 he has held solo and group exhibits in galleries and museums all over the world, including the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris and the Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts.

For centuries soft shadows in painting expressed mood, emotion and intimacy at least as much as color can. Da Vinci used chiaroscuro to convey the ambiguity of human expression; Caravaggio to highlight the drama and tumult of life; Vermeer to hint at blooming youth and the inner world of thoughts and emotions; La Tour to suggest simple faith and pensiveness.

The Swiss photographer Philippe Pache (http://www.philippepache.com/) relies upon this time-tested technique in painting to bring life, drama and, above all, reverie and contemplation to artistic photography. His nudes exude beauty and tranquility. They are exquisitely posed yet look completely natural. The focus of his images is on how each gesture and expression—the body itself—reveals a rich inner world of thoughts and feelings. The interplay of light and shadow not only highlights the depth of human subjectivity, but also marks the fluid boundaries between humanity and nature. Some of his portraits, though always beautiful, are facial landscapes of light, contour and shadow.

They gleam with the insentience of the mountains, sea and land that sometimes surround them; they become one, interchangeable with their magnificent natural settings. The beauty of femininity captured by Pache goes beyond realistic visual representation. It is the landscape of haunting and delicate dreams. Sometimes, as in the photograph called Cecilia, below, there’s no clear distinction between dreamer and dream. The beautiful young woman, bathed in fiery reds, sleeps peacefully as she, herself, is depicted as a figment of our imaginations, as a dream. Recognizably beautiful yet also indistinct, she floats above the dark shadows and red sheets that envelop her like a vapor.

Dreams are often vague and fragmentary. When we wake up, we rarely remember the whole “picture”: just those frames that broke through the veil of sleep and rose to the surface of our consciousness. Since we often dream about our deepest fears or most poignant desires, the fragmentary, partial nature of our dreams is perhaps nature’s way to protect us from ourselves: from what we either pursue or try to escape most in life. In Joined Hands, the photograph below, Pache once again captures both dreamer and dream. This image reveals an angelic young woman dressed in white, with her hands joined in quiet resignation or fervid prayer: we’ll never know which, since in Pache’s postromantic reveries, the dreamer remains as partial and mysterious as her dreams.